Unable to export from iPhoto 7
Fri, 10 August 2007
If you have upgraded to iPhoto 7 (iLife 08) and are unable to export your photos, this may be due to an incompatible or broken plug-in.
What happens is … well nothing. You select a few photos and click on File | Export and nothing really happens. This is what you have to do to fix the problem:
Open the Finder, navigate to ~/Applications / iPhoto (where “~” is your profile, your user name) then right-click on iPhoto and select Show package contents.
Then click your way through Contents / Plugins and you will finally see the list of your iPhoto plug-ins.
You will see a number of plug-ins listed here and you will need to figure out which one might be a dodgy one. In my case it was iPhoto2Gmail and once I removed it and restarted the iPhoto, the export worked fine.
So how do you know which one? It will help if you could remember which plug-ins you had installed in your iPhoto 6 before upgrading. Simply click and drag the suspect plug-in folder to your desktop and start iPhoto. If the export works - bingo, you’ve got the right one. If not, put the folder back where it was and try another one. Restart iPhoto and try exporting.
Make sure you do one at the time. Common ones are iPhoto2Gallery, FlickrExport, iPhoto2Gmail, Picasa web album Exporter.
Just figured out another thing you can do (thanks Terence) - open Finder, go to Applications and right click on the iPhoto icon, then select Get info.
In the info window expand the plugins menu and disable the suspecting plug-in. Go one at a time, restart iPhoto and try export. Once you figured out which one is the troublemaker, select it and click Remove. Restart iPhoto and enjoy.
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Guy said: Sat, 11 August 2007 at 10:39
Thanks for the tip! I had the same issue - looks like it was my Flickr plugin.
Thanks!
Guy
Wilson Laidlaw said: Sun, 12 August 2007 at 01:54
iPhoto 08 seems to export a file but you could die of old age while it is doing it. I am using a 2.15 GHz Core duo 2 20″ iMac with 1.5Gb RAM. I got bored and canceled the image export to the desktop I was doing as a trial. To my surprise, the entire image seemed to have exported anyway but iPhoto did not seem to have thought it was finished.
On another front - any ideas how to get ScreenSaver to show images in hi-res. Since I installed iLife 08 yesterday, the quality of images on ScreenSaver from my Pictures folder have been dreadful. They look like upscaled thumbnails. They are mostly 40 to 60 MB 16 bit TIFF’s so they should look good and they did before the upgrade.
Perry Garvin said: Mon, 13 August 2007 at 04:44
Thanks! Worked like a charm!
Uri said: Mon, 13 August 2007 at 11:16
Thanks a lot! Very helpful! Now we just need to wait for google to update its plugins.
Luke said: Mon, 13 August 2007 at 16:46
It was the Facebook Exporter that was preventing me from exporting photos.
Bob said: Tue, 14 August 2007 at 01:08
Thanks for this tip! In my particular case, it was Missing Sync, Facebook, and Picasa.
Laurent said: Tue, 14 August 2007 at 06:25
Great for getting export to the local drive to work. However I am also trying to upload photos to Picassa web from iPhoto 7 and so far with no success (I have removed all other 3rd party plugins).
Any help appreciated.
Laurent
Chelsea said: Sun, 19 August 2007 at 05:14
I just got a brand new iMac and am having this problem… I haven’t transfered any plugins… what ever plugins are there came with the computer.. do I still have to try to figure out what plugin is a problem? I don’t have any of the gmail, picasa, flikr etc… plugins.. but I still can’t export any pics from iphoto to an email, flikr, xanga, etc.. Very frustrating. Any suggestions?
Donald Wilson said: Tue, 21 August 2007 at 11:59
After looking at the plug-ins for iPhoto, I noticed there were two plug-ins with similar titles: “FileExporter.iPhotoExporter” and “FileExporter2.iPhotoExporter”. I unchecked “FileExporter.iPhotoExporter and iPhoto was able to make an export. The I did the reverse and was unable to export a photo. Therefore, by unchecking “FileExporter.iPhotoExporter” everything seems to work properly.
Bruce Menozzi said: Thu, 23 August 2007 at 11:10
I did not have any third-party plug-ins, so I was skeptical about removing plug-ins. However, I had the same symptoms as Donald Wilson did and the fix worked identically. This system was originally running iLife 04 which had been sequentially upgraded to iLife 08. Thanks again for the great advice!!!
Jonathan Reed said: Fri, 24 August 2007 at 07:46
Thanks for the advice. The one that broke it for me was the Facebook exporter. An excellent little plugin it is. Luckily they’ve already updated it to work with iPhoto 7. Just remove the current one and install the new one from:
http://developers.facebook.com/iphoto/
(version 1.0.3 is the one you want)
cheers
stevo said: Sun, 26 August 2007 at 13:09
thanks for being there. 5 minutes of panic. 1 minute on silver mac. 10 seconds to remove flickr plugin… iphoto export now works…priceless
Peter MacLaren said: Sun, 26 August 2007 at 22:01
Many thanks for identifying the problem. In fact the easiest way to resolve it is to work the opposite way round. Right click on iPhoto, open package and then drag the Plug-ins folder to your desktop. Then delete iPhoto and reinstall it from the iLife DVD. All the normally required plug-ins will be reinstalled. Exporting will then work. If necessary you can then compare the new plug-in folder with the old one and selectively reinstall plug-ins on a trial and error basis. As typically there will be only one or two that are obvious candidates to try, and as you probably only need to do this if something you normally use with iPhoto is now broken, this approach will save you a lot of time. Clearly the Apple iLife 08 installer should be quarantining and flagging 3rd party plug-ins (other than ones they have tested) - hopefully now that this problem is aired they will do something with an update to address it.
John Dennett said: Tue, 28 August 2007 at 14:24
FYI, Donald Wilson’s fix worked for me too. Thanks for all the info everyone!
Creative Bearings said: Thu, 30 August 2007 at 02:03
Thanks! I found FileExporter conflicted with FileExporter2.
I did not have to install or reinstall anything.
I appreciate your page.
Greg
Espen Langvik said: Mon, 10 September 2007 at 02:19
Hi there!
I Have had the same problem, only iPhoto shuts down, and when I click on the reopen button, I can’t move pictures from events to folders, or even drag them into a finder-folder. The message I get for the latter is that one of the pictures are in use, and cannot be moved… A lot of this is going on, and I am in despair… Any way of rolling back to the old iLife ‘06? At least until some of the bugs are cleared out… Thanks. Espen
brooks said: Fri, 14 September 2007 at 01:49
Thanks! I had the FileExporter vs FileExporter2 conflict as well, with no third party plug-ins installed. Thanks for the advice!
Mike said: Mon, 17 September 2007 at 16:06
Great tip.. I knew my flickr export plugin would cause problems and it did but so did a SSH/FTP script plugin I used a long time ago to “export” critical files up to my FTP server. AS far as the FileExporter vs FileExporter2 conflict went, I had this and I didnt know it till I deleted both and saw the file export was not an option any more (and the menu came up). I pull FileExporter from a back up and put it back and now the menu was there but greyed out. I had to use Pacifist to get the FileExport2 off the DVD and put it back in the plug in folder and now, Life is good :)
rajmataj said: Tue, 25 September 2007 at 02:43
I too am suffering from the lack of support of iPhoto 7 and Picasa Web Albums Uploaders. The Google site says erroneously, that ‘iPhoto 4.0 or above required to use the iPhoto plugin’ but apparently didn’t test this.
What you can do to access your original photos in iPhoto 7 is right-click on the iPhoto Library in your Pictures folder, and select ‘Show Package Contents’. In that folder you’ll see Originals. Make an alias of this and put it in your Pictures folder. Through this, you can now easily access your original pictures that are in iPhoto, without having to launch iPhoto. Once into your Original folder, drag whichever pictures you’d like to upload to your online Picasa Web Album into the stand-alone application (Picasa Web Albums Uploader in your Apps folder).
Hopefully it won’t be long before Google, or some enterprising developer, figures out how to get the Picasa Export feature working in iPhoto 7. Until then, this should do the trick.
happy-buddha said: Wed, 3 October 2007 at 21:24
oh thank you!
Bryce said: Sun, 14 October 2007 at 22:53
Google provide a new version of picasa web photo uploader (both iphoto plugin and standalone) which work greats with iphoto 7.
It doesnt not appear on google site.
You can find it here :
http://dl.google.com/mac/download/com.google.photouploaders.1.1.0.71.dmg
Bryce
James B. said: Fri, 2 November 2007 at 04:31
Thank you very much. My offending plugin was for facebook…
Benny Lava said: Fri, 9 November 2007 at 23:35
Does anyone have some infos about the low -res screensaver issue.
Karl said: Wed, 30 January 2008 at 00:51
I had both the facebook and file expoter2 plugins. Works. Thanks.
Simon said: Sun, 16 March 2008 at 19:41
Wow Thanks very much. Damn Facebook export plugin as I suspected but would never have figured this out on my own.
Another reason to ditch Facebook!
Thanks again
oh noes! said: Tue, 25 March 2008 at 11:55
Gaaaahhh! I keel you!
I followed the Get Info version of your instructions and now my iPhoto hangs and hangs. Even after going in and re-selecting the checkbox I unchecked, I get the same behavior.
Very sad, but mostly confused by this behavior. The only plugin I have is FlickrExport 2.0.14. Not sure why this would happen after so simple an action, esp. after undoing it.
What makes it worse is that I’m on vacation now, and have been photo-blogging my adventures for family and friends. I don’t have my install discs with me to re-do everything. Vacation cat is not pleased.